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Connecticut College Professor´s new book celebrates the life and legacy of the "Electricity Fairy"

Rhonda K. Garelick´s "Electric Salome"

September 13, 2007

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an obscure, uneducated woman from the dustbowl of the American West went to Europe and became an international celebrity.

Known as the "electricity fairy," Loie Fuller was "not a likely candidate for stardom," said Rhonda K. Garelick, associate professor of French at Connecticut College. "She was untrained, not conventionally beautiful and an out lesbian. She wasn´t even a very good dancer. But she was a genius, an inventor, and the first woman filmmaker in the world."

In her new book, "Electric Salome: Loie Fuller´s Performance of Modernism," Garelick examines Fuller´s deeper connection to performance history. The book, recently released by Princeton University Press, demonstrates "that Fuller was not a mere entertainer or precursor, but a major artist whose work helped lay a foundation for all modernist performances to come," Garelick said.

In fact, Garelick says it was Fuller´s influence on other artists that first piqued her own interest in Fuller. Garelick´s first book, "Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender, and Performance in the Fin de Siecle," included a chapter about Fuller that Garelick says was prompted by poems written about Fuller.

"She was rendered in art, over and over again," Garelick said. "I realized that I was studying men´s interpretations of her art, and I wanted to go back and look at her without this filter."

Garelick examined nearly every facet of Fuller´s life, completing many years of research in Paris, London, Washington State and at the New York Library for Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. She reviewed nearly 30 years of Fuller´s personal and professional letters, visited the theaters where Fuller performed, interviewed her descendents, spoke with the last living person who worked with her and even found and viewed Fuller´s few remaining films.

The result of her research "is a cinematic narrative touching on politics, sex, celebrity, literature and dance," Garelick said. She added, "I thought it was the story of a woman´s life, and it wound up being a new way to look at the modernist movement."

For more information contact: Amy Sullivan (860) 439-2526; amy.sullivan@conncoll.edu